


to half-live as a warning

by sandyk



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Chromatic Yuletide, Gen, vaguely post season finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2019-02-10 19:36:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12918828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandyk/pseuds/sandyk
Summary: Lucy said, "I realized every time I came home there were different books on my mother's shelves and on mine, different histories we both wrote."





	to half-live as a warning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [intrikate88](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/gifts).



> Title and opening quote from Nina Puro's Stilted (Relapse). not mine, no profit garnered. I have nothing against Heather Graham, I randomly chose from IMDB.

_(It was like being allowed to half-live as a warning—scaled, clawed, diminished of my own accord.)_

 

Lucy said, "I've slowly been realizing that we come home and say nothing really changed and so much has changed. Which is why I brought by this copy I made of your pictures and movies of your family."

Agent Christopher took the USB drive. She turned it over in her hands. 

Lucy said, "Please tell me you remember giving me this."

"I do," Christopher said. "You think it's going to be different."

"Not radically, but yes, radically in some ways. I wrote a book about the Lincoln assassination, you know? I finally read it recently and it was like, I don't remember half of that research. There was, ugh, there's been a lot of revisions. The Lucy from this timeline would have corrected you that Johnson's bodyguard saved him. I wrote a whole chapter about the black soldiers who actually did save Johnson," Lucy said. "I realized every time I came home there were different books on my mother's shelves and mine, different histories we both wrote."

"More books?" Agent Christopher was still playing with the USB drive. She hadn't put it in her laptop. 

"The number doesn't change, but the titles have. Just one or two. And my mom, yes, more books. Since she never married my father, she wrote three more books," Lucy said. "Plus, other historian's books. I thought about keeping track of the changes, but it's one more thing I'd have to put in the Lifeboat and who would even use that information? We can't get it back."

Christopher sighed. "Are you sure we can't get it back?"

Lucy smiled. "I asked Rufus about it, and he drew this diagram for me. He dumbed it down a lot." 

"The yellow line is the timeline Rufus, Wyatt and I remember. Mostly what we three remember, since Wyatt and Rufus changed things back in the 80s, and we went to the 1920s France without Wyatt. So really Rufus is the only one of us who remembers the original timeline completely."

"That timeline, where your sister was alive, is the mustard color," Christopher said.

"Yes. And then we go back to the 1930s, and there's a new timeline. But when we go to the reddish timeline, we're still yellow. Then we go back further and a new timeline branches off. And it just keeps going. It's also not that clear a divergence, like a line breaking off parallel as you might think. I checked my family tree, my father, who I thought was my father - he has two more sisters than he did when we were growing up, me and Amy. But just since the Bonnie and Clyde time trip. Isn't it weird?"

"What do I do if it's different? Do you think I have new sisters? Or my wife is, is someone else?" Christopher looked down at the USB drive. "I didn't want to forget my family, but this is from another timeline, apparently. Do I still have the same wife?"

"Yes," Lucy said. "She looks the same in those pictures." Lucy smiled. "They all look the same."

Christopher smiled. She put the USB drive in. She said, "So far so good. My daughter and her gymnastics class." She tapped the screen with her finger.

"She takes gymnastics and ballet?" Lucy finally sat down.

Christopher looked down. "She never took ballet."

Lucy spread her fingers on the table and tried to be calm. "She did, a few timelines ago, I guess."

"It's so frightening," Agent Christopher said. "We have to accept that some changes will happen and as long as we don't stop the big changes, we're okay. But we're not, are we?"

Lucy shrugged. "I'd like to say it's fascinating, but yeah, mostly it's frightening. Hemingway wrote three books I've never read, and two of his books I remember reading he never wrote. So it's one more book, right? Maybe that's good. In the history I remember, Katherine Johnson was just becoming famous in the past few years."

"My wife went to the first Katherine Johnson High School," Christopher said, smiling. "She realized she was a lesbian when she saw Sherie MacIntyre in the Katherine Johnson biopic. The one from 1979."

"I hadn't even heard of Sherie MacIntyre until last week. That was her first big role, I guess. I don't know where she ended up in my timeline. And no one seems to know who Heather Graham is in this timeline. I don't know how we did that at all," Lucy said. 

"But we both know who Greta Garbo is," Christopher said, smiling. "Right?"

"Yeah, like I said, it's small changes. The history I remember is 75% right, the pop culture is about 90% according to Rufus. I just wondered if any of that affected your family and I was right, but not in a bad way, I guess," Lucy said.

"To some extent it's all in a bad way, however you want to put it," Agent Christopher said. "We are the sum of our experiences. You are an older sister even if you're the only one who knows it. Even with the small changes, we're all different people every time you come home." 

"That's really depressing," Lucy said. 

"Sorry," Christopher said. She closed her laptop and took out the USB drive. "Maybe I don't want to know."

"Maybe you should make a new one," Lucy said. 

Agent Christopher smiled. "No. No."

"Are you sure?"

"I think I am," Christopher said. "I wonder, if, when you get your sister back, how different will she be? You'll be different."

"I try not to think about that," Lucy said. "I'll remember when she was gone, how different everything was, and now I know who my biological father is. When it happens, when she's back, I'll have the wrong memories. I won't have her memories."

"Or she won't have your memories," Christopher said. Her voice was kind, but Lucy didn't feel comforted.

"I'll never really get her back," Lucy said. "I'll get her back, but it won't be my life." She sighed. 

"But we keep trying," Agent Christopher said. She handed over the USB drive. "Thank you for bringing this by."

"Now that we're both sad," Lucy said, laughing slightly. 

"But determined," Agent Christopher said. 

"Right," Lucy said. "Determined. Pigheaded." 

"You are who you are; always, uh, pigheaded," Christopher said. 

Lucy did laugh then.


End file.
